Rating: 
Summary: good read, bad research
Review: I like this kind of pseudo-scientific high-tech thriller and I found this book while on a business trip in Boise, ID. Dan Brown managed to keep me want to read on and find out what this unbreakable code is about and who's going to get it first.However, I was quite disappointed when he got into languages other than English. I don't know about the Spanish and Italian, but the German used in this book certainly sounded like Mr. Brown had just written up some sentences in English and sent it through some free translation service on the Internet. No native German speaker would talk like the German character in Digital Fortress - wrong words, wrong grammar, wrong everything. What makes it worse is that Mr. Brown keeps pointing out that his main character's German was perfect and indistinguishable from the real thing. That might be true - for someone who has never bothered to learn any languages other than English and bad English. Quite obviously Mr. Brown did not intend to have his book read outside the USA. Otherwise he would have put more effort into getting the linguistic side of his - after all - linguist main character right. This lack of research will pretty much prevent me from buying any other of Dan Brown's books.
Rating: 
Summary: A horrible Novel
Review: Being a Computer Science Major, I usually stay away from technothrillers, but having reading Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I was optimistic. Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed. While Dan Brown's other books may be well researched, this one was not. The numerous technical mistakes, impossible programs, and bad jargon forced me to forget everything i had ever learned about computers just to continue to the next page. The characters flat and one dimensional: the fiercely independent hacker, the loyal workaholic, the innocent professor, the list goes on and on. Further, to force the already shaky plot forward, Brown relies on a seemingly miraculous series of well intentioned, but otherwise stupid individuals. Finally, Brown's thesis for the novel seems to center on the innate good of the NSA and their ability to spy on the communications of every person in this country. He constantly derides the EFF as a bunch of crazy liberal hackers, who are hoplessly naive. Overall, I believe this book has soured me on all of Dan Brown's work. He's lost a reader here.
Rating: 
Summary: Finishing this Book Was Painful
Review: I won't enumerate the many many many ridiculous "plot" points, but it was truly painful to get through. After Divinci Code, this was a major letdown.
Rating:
Summary: This one's riding on the broad shoulders of The Davinci Code
Review: This book isn't horrible but it is about 100 pages too long. The characters are gushy, mushy, and maudlin. It had promise but it's a blah. If you would like to read a thriller about government employees run amok, read Stan Lee's "Dunn's Conundrum". If he'd spent a little more time on it Dan Brown could have made "Digital Fortress" as good. The bad guy only needs the diabolical laughter to sound like a saturday morning cartoon character.
Rating:
Summary: Inaccuracies abound...
Review: I would call this novel an interesting, easy read if not for its plot holes and many factual inaccuracies. The main plot relies on the idea of an unbreakable code, the Digital Fortress. Unfortunately the idea is nonsense -- their 'rotating cleartext' would ensure only that the message couldn't be read. The government's supercomputer could break a code with a 256-character key in 12 minutes, but were able to break a code with a 1-million bit key after only 3 hours... Even if a supercomputer could break a code as complex as the first in 12 minutes, the second would take many lifetimes of the universe to crack. Similarly, if the virus code had a 256-character key, no one trained in cryptology would allow the supercomputer to run for hours on end, since once it failed to recognize plaintext the first pass through, it would simply fail. Despite the fact that the main characters were cryptologists working at the top secret NSA, typical cinematic-style passwords are used frequently - thee major codes are as short as 1-5 characters! Let's not even get so far as to consider the implausibility of a virus in an encrypted message (since the data is treated as data, not an executable). That's too much to expect of a novelist, right... even if the book is "the most realistic techno-thriller" as quoted on the back cover?
Rating:
Summary: Strikingly unintelligent
Review: Digital Fortress" hints at being a thinking man's technothriller - using codes and human intuition instead of fighter jets and nu-cue-ler subs. Instead, it's full of implausible characters and uninspired plot twists, and worst of all, it never stops reminding you how smart it thinks it is. THE PLOT: a disgruntled/now dead programmer has created a seemingly unbreakable code: "Digital Fortress", setting off a fierce hunt for its code key. While the key to DF is distributed on the internet, it's encrypted by the DF. Whoever unlocks the code will have access to the ultimate protection against decryption. Hostile governments, organized criminals or terrorists will be able to communicate freely over the internet completely immune to detection. Fearing this, the NSA (the US agency responsible for signals analysis and cracking codes) sends free-lance genius Dave Becker to Seville, where the programmer died. Strathmore, the NSA's head code breaker hopes that DF's creator left some clue to the code key behind. Unfortunately, Becker isn't alone on his hunt...
Meanwhile, back at the NSA's high-tech HQ, Susan Fletcher, our hero's brilliant and sexy NSA genius of a girlfriend, tries picking up the mystery from her end of the Atlantic, where TRNSLTR, Strathmore's newest codebreaking supercomputer, is busy melting itself down trying to crack DF. Unfortunately, it looks like somebody is after Susan's as well - from the inside - and we get the hint that she shouldn't feel as safe as she does when Strathmore is around. Back in Spain, Becker quickly learns that DF's creator had worn a ring when he died - but it's missing. Quickly guessing that inscriptions on the ring say more than "one ring to rule them all", our hero tracks it across Spain, learning how quickly it moves from owner to owner. Unfortunately, whoever owns the ring (even briefly) is marked for death by a mysterious assassin - a deaf killer who never misses, and catalogs his kills on a Palm Pilot. HOWEVER: This novel was horrible at just about every level, lacking in style or substance. It's not only strikingly unintelligent, but strikingly arch. To read "Fortress", you'd think Brown learned more about cryptography and the NSA than most people cared to hear about, and thus crafted a novel based on his "insider" info about cryptography. (Brown's story heavily relies on a perceived ignorance of what the NSA stands for - an agency, he writes, that only a small percentage of Americans understand. Rather than showing that Brown is a writer who has learnt what most us can't, "Digital Fortress" proves that Brown focuses on remote subjects not likely to have a large number of experts who can effectively challenge his pretensions of realism.) Actually, I learned more about cryptography while writing a paper about the Walker Family Spy Ring in high school, and most will probably learn more about the NSA watching "Sneakers" or "Good Will Hunting". How do you like them apples?) Instead of intelligent clues, Brown's story builds on arcane trivia (the etymology of the word "sincere", certain technical details distinguishing the different a-bombs used against Japan). I was able to piece together some of Brown's clues, not because I'm smarter than most, but simply because I watch a lot of the History channel. Getting past the "thrill" and "techno" aspects of the story, what's left is thin - Brown's ring-plot provides an excuse to send our hero across Seville, hunting the ring, making this less of a novel of any genre than a college-writing version of "Where I Went Last Summer" (complete with Spanish dialog repeated in English). Brown's thin story is plumped, not with some redeeming characters of depth and intelligent plot turns, but with unbelievably stupid characters and unbelievable plot twists. Our hero is no action hero (he stays in shape playing racquetball), yet he manages to elude the hitman who has carved a path of precision-guided death across Seville. Susan is beautiful and brilliant - though Brown never leaves us doubting as to which half matters more (Susan is probably the least independent, most vulnerable, unintelligent and otherwise dated female character I've seen in any technothriller; even her smarts are just a convenient device to explain why she's working with the NSA.) Strathmore is supposed to be a cryptographer par excellence, yet he defies belief - he's so obsessed with DF that he rams it into his priceless super-codebreaking computer, bypassing security checks meant to protect it from viruses. He does this despite knowing that DF is obviously more than it appears (its code for heaven's sake!!). There's another NSA co-worker, a guy who's supposed to set off our alarm bells, but it's obvious that Brown only means him to distract us from Strathmore since Brown couldn't be bothered to come up with more characters. Like Strathmore, the rest of the denizens of NSA headquarters are so dim, it's inconceivable that they'd be trusted to run a third rate ISP, let alone the most sophisticated code-breaking computer in the world. (Typical for low-grade technothrillers, Brown is so obsessed credentialing his characters as geniuses, he devotes little time to writing them even slightly smart. They're stellar when it facing Brown's artificial plot challenges, but in common sense terms, Beavis and Butthead would eat these guys for lunch). By the climax, I couldn't care whether the NSA would be destroyed by the killer code, mostly because the author had by then changed from telling a story to giving a pitch for some splashy action movie, making the novel's Hollywood aspirations annoyingly clear. In short, storm some other fortress.
Rating:
Summary: OK, but somewhat predictable
Review: It's not a bad read, but many situtations were fairly predicatable. That kind of elimated some of the suspense.
Rating:
Summary: OK to read if you have nothing else better to do.
Review: Da Vinci Code was fascinating and I was expecting another good read, but was sorely disappointed. I don't totally blame Dan Brown - the publishing company unearthed this obviously older novel to piggy-back on Mr. Brown's current popularity. It was terribly out of date and full of holes.
Rating:
Summary: Decent but way too many plotholes.
Review: Note this review contains spoilers I would rather give this 2 1/2 but since you can't I'll have to round down on this book, on account of having WAY too many plotholes. Here's some of the more notable ones. The idea of a "rotating cleartext" makes absolutely no sense. If decrypted text is still shifted into gibberish after inserting the encryption key, how can a rotating cleartext EVER be used on a practical level? If the assassin in Spain was deaf, how did he know the names of all his victims? Strathmore kills an innocent man who is trying to cut power because "if Digital Fortress is going to be the NSA's new baby, he wants to be sure it's unbreakable!" Someone tell me why it matters if it's unbreakable or not? Wasn't it a bit weird that Strathmore suddenly came to the revelation that Digital Fortress was fake at the EXACT same moment Susan did even though they were in completely seperate rooms? ZIP is not an encryption algorithm Digital Fortress is mildy entertaininf if you've got nothing else to read but there's alot of other stuff you could read first.
Rating:
Summary: An Average Thriller
Review: This book has nothing to do with "The Da Vinci Code". Moreover, it is full of inaccuracies (for example, Dan Brown states that the Nagasaki bomb did not use plutonium as its fissionable matter) and is more worthy of a beginner author. If you really want to read some good tech-spy-thrillers go to the pros, such as Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. The reason I did give it three stars and not less is that it did help me pass many hours waiting in the airport for my flight. That is, the book as a thriller is basically good. However, if you're expecting something like "The Da Vinci Code" or just a good, accurate, realistic, researched thriller, don't waste your time with this book.
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